GOP Needs Unity, Hunter Needs Lawyers, No One Needs Context

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, but the star and the namesake.

And that's the man who with the wisdom.

And that's why you're here.

You hear him.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

And he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Amar Shabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

If you're new to the show, welcome.

Happy to have you here.

You should know that Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

And I'll tell you more about that later in the show.

So much has happened.

this past week.

Many things Victor has discussed

with the great Sammy Wink on some of the other editions of the Victor Davis Hansen show.

I encourage you to go listen to them.

But some of the things we're going to talk about on this episode are Victor's recent X slash Twitter posting about the

Ivy League College presidents who testified before Congress, as he calls them, the three blind mice.

And we have a Hunter Biden indictment.

We have some crazy congressional testimony about Catholics and transgenderism.

And then we also have Victor's thoughts about Victor the Traveler.

And we're going to get to all these things right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

You know, Victor, I want to set things clear again for some of our listeners who heard, you know, recently when you said you're retiring, but what you meant, you're retiring from travel, right?

You've had job-like travel experiences more than

most people

I know.

And you went on

another,

a speaking,

I'm not going to call it a tour, but you were speaking in Florida,

the Hoover Institution and

six days, yeah.

But tell us about, get it out of the way.

Tell us about Victorian airports and airplanes.

Well, part of the problem is, you know, when I'm at work, I fly to San Jose and has a good airport.

And some of them are transcontinental, but then I have to drive three hours to my farm.

So I've been, I fly from Fresno, and that means you've got to get connection.

But on the way back,

I go in Palm Beach very early.

It's a short connection, 45 minutes, but we get in and the plane is ready to go and we're going to be on time.

And of course, I thought the plane came in the night before, Jack.

So what happens in 12 hours?

Does something go wrong when it sits there?

So we get in the plane, we're ready to go, and guess what?

A little light in the cockpit was on.

And Palm Beach is not a big airport, so they have to contract out 10, 20 minutes, of course.

And I don't blame the pilots, you know, but they have, they have to, they can't say it's going to be, you you know, an hour.

So by the time we took off, I was going to miss my connection.

Okay, the next connection is

Dallas.

Yeah, the next thing is seven hours later.

So I go out

and it says that the connecting flight to Fresno is already, you know, on the, it says taxi.

Because you have those little apps, you know, from different sources.

So I start sitting down, having coffee, and then I thought, wait a minute, it's been taxing a long time.

It's so I run over to two terminals.

It's hard to do in Dallas.

You got to take those little sky rates.

Yeah.

And so, anyway, I get there and the doors closed.

And I say, what's happening?

They said, well, they have to come back in.

And I said, is there any chance you're going to let?

And there were three other people who missed the different flights.

And they said, well, we don't know, but stick around.

So I went over to get finished.

You know,

I had bought the coffee and didn't just do it away because I was running.

And so now I went to go get another one.

And all of a sudden, the guy

who was, he was walking into the bathroom.

He said, you better come back.

And then they said, of course, in 20 minutes, you can board.

Well, I had a business ticket.

I lost that, of course.

So they just said, board anywhere you're going to go.

So you get on the plane.

And my God, I was only going to be, I missed the connection.

It was an hour.

So it was about two-hour delay, right?

This isn't bad.

Sit, sit, sit, sit.

The problem that made me, the problem that my connecting flight had that brought it back from taxiing that gave me an opportunity, at least to get a bad seat,

free-for-all seat, was now not addressed.

This is a American Airlines port, right?

So I thought, wow.

Right.

You know, hub.

Dallas is a hub for American Airlines.

Yeah.

So I thought, wow, they'll fix it, but they couldn't fix it.

We sat there for almost an hour, just right next to the, you know, in the sky hookup.

So then they take us back.

And now everybody's out, you know, 150 or whatever.

And they cancel the flight.

So whatever the problem was with the brakes, they couldn't fix it.

And the brakes problem had given me a chance to,

you know, so now it's getting up to three hours.

And then they bring another.

And then all of a sudden, I'm looking at my six-hour, seven-hour flight doesn't look that bad.

It's only, you know, it's four hours I'd have to wait.

So, but I'm looking at, you know, probably

with the time going to the airport, going home, I'm looking like a 16-hour trip.

And then they brought another plane in.

So then we board that plane, we get home, and the whole thing was

just

never knew what was going to happen.

Nobody knew what was going to happen.

Four-hour delay,

but much better than

seven and a half-hour delay.

That's just typical.

Every time you get on

planes, yeah, it is.

I don't know which is better.

I always thought I couldn't get a Delta flight.

My experience is Delta best

of the major carriers and then American and then the worst is United.

But last time I was in United, they were very polite and I took a non-stop flight.

So they couldn't screw that up.

How did from Fresno to

no?

Well, they had, you know what?

Fresno had non-stop flights to chicago for a while

that was that was my uh famous flight where we took off four hours late from chicago and there was because there was one baggage handler

and he and he couldn't i mean it took him an hour to do it and then we got in the air uh late four hours late and then we decided that we had to stop at denver because we didn't have enough fuel for the next morning flight so we had to top off our flight because there wasn't enough fuel in fresno for the morning flight and it would be half an hour but but two hours later we take off from Denver to get to Fresno and that thing was I don't know what it was nine to ten hours late so that was my non-stop easygoing no problem flight from Chicago to Fresno but that flight has been apparently terminated that that route and I'm in a bad mood anyway because I mean You go to Palm Beach, you speak, speak, you get jet lag, and then you do this.

And I came home with a flu.

And then

that trip, and I felt bad because it was a messy flu, if you know what I mean, coughing, sneezing, and you're right next to a poor guy and you had a mask on.

And I apologized.

I didn't know what to do.

I kind of put my turn my, it was kind of a middle seat, one was where you're there.

That was all was left.

You're there.

And then the jump seat was the attendant, you know.

Yeah.

So they come in and sit down.

So I was in the middle for some of the

flight.

But anyway, this is in my other trial.

I'm still waiting for, it's five months, Jack, a beautiful Echo Diesel Ram 1500, 30 miles a gallon, 830 mile

range on it.

Nothing wrong.

20,000 miles or so.

Turbo blows out.

One month to get it in.

Wait.

Another month to fix it.

They fix it, but I haven't had a truck for two months.

And I got out.

Three, four weeks later, the turbo hose blows that they put in new.

So then I say, well, it'll be a month almost to get in.

Okay, I wait a month, no truck, three months now.

They put it in, and that is October 7th and November 17th.

It's two months.

It's sitting there for the want of a little turbo hose

because they can't get it.

And so, bottom line, you pay $60,000 for a beautiful truck, and in two years, it's been there five months.

And then they send you, Mopar sends you, of course that the high pressure fuel pump is defective and it could go out and they warn you in the letter it can go out anytime get them fixed of course i've called them three times dealers oh we don't have them well i said well why do you send a letter to get it fixed immediately and it's a hazard So now it's sitting in there waiting for a turbo hose, but it also has a recall, very important on a high-pressure fuel pump.

Of course, I said, why don't you just, if you think it's just take a new, new, old model because it would have 20,000?

No, you can't do that.

So I am at this point so angry at Ram.

I haven't had a truck for five months

that I'm going to go in there.

And I offered them the dealer.

I won't mention the dealer, but I will if this goes on.

I'm going to offer them a deal.

I said, you give me the,

and it's all, it's a beautiful truck.

I put, you know, the, you know, the, the lid on the bed that folds up and all that stuff.

I did all all that and I coated the bed.

It's really a beautiful truck.

I really loved it.

And it was wonderful to drive to Stanford back and forth.

But I said to him, why don't you buy me, just give me the, I'll pay the sticker price for a new, and I won't even go to, I love tundras.

I had a tundra for 16 years.

It never had one thing.

I gave it to my daughter.

I said, I will buy a tundra.

The reason I didn't is because they don't have V8s and the new models.

But I tell you what, I will uh buy a ram from you at your sticker price if you just take back your beautiful truck that's been in your shop now for five months and give me and i will i will write off the 2500

uh warranty i will write off the 1700 bedliner and bedtop and you just and i won't try to haggle with you just give me the sticker price on either a new echo diesel that's sitting there you can't sell because of the recall or a gas and i haven't heard i mean they didn't seem very excited about that well

check your emails for me i forwarded an email i'm not sure if it was from mike you know i have to filter i'll check whoever it was because i haven't yeah i haven't i haven't had a chance to look at them yet yeah parts uh guy wants to uh give you some uh parts help if if uh if he if he can victor you this is your show uh you know these

the rants are are appreciated by people i'm just trying to think with the way they treat everybody yes this wasn't true five or six years ago the airlines made i mean they're their planes are i i don't know if they've been sitting too long during covid but they're overtaxed and when a plane comes in and there's something wrong with it they have 12 hours to fix it and they don't and i and this has happened more than four or five times i told you the united flight the window wouldn't go up and it was when you take the first flight out and the plane came in the day before, you know, like seven in the at night or 10 or 4 in the afternoon.

Right.

You would, and I mean, I know that I don't know anything about planes, but usually when my car runs pretty well and I put it in the garage, and then the next morning, it's the same as it was that night.

Good odds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I don't know what they're doing, but they, and then they, I think they're under some policy not to disclose, I guess, the actual weight.

And part of the problem is us, the people, you know, when you go on those planes,

I was on the same plane and a woman next to me, nice woman, had a very large bag.

And I said, it's not going to fit.

She came in late.

I said, it's not going to fit in the old, but she was, you know, kind of frail.

There was no place to put it.

So I said, I'll put it in.

So I put it in.

tight squeeze, very heavy, and I didn't touch it to try to close it.

Well, the attendant did a really nice job.

He tries to close it and guess what the whole thing breaks and all the stuff's out so now we're ready to take off and i'm in the third aisle so i can make this connection which i didn't think i would but at least i would be out the door and they take all of our bags to the very back so then we we have to wait 15 minutes because our overhead is now taped shut and empty and all of our bags are put way in the back.

And I was really careful.

I let most people go, but I thought, you know, maybe the thing is taxing.

I didn't know what would happen.

I wanted to get out of there.

So I kind of, you know, went, went two rows when a guy was taking his bags out.

Then I ducked into an aisle, then two, but I didn't hold it up, right?

Right, right.

And this woman says to me, how dare you do this?

You have no right to go back here.

I said, I haven't obstructed anybody.

While you get your bags, I go too.

And I said, you're taking more time to yell at me than you would just to leave.

I said, I was on, I had the second row.

I paid a lot of money for a business ticket, and I have no overhead.

They just took it and put it way at the back.

I need to get it, and I'm not holding anybody up.

You know, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, well, people are so,

you know, it's just, it's partly the passengers don't listen, they don't care, they're rude, and

it's just a lot of anxiety.

It's not worth it, yeah.

It is, it is, it's not worth it.

I'm, I, I've said uh, the last 10 days, no, no, no.

Please, thank you very much.

Very kind of you.

That was very gracious.

That was very generous, but I'm not doing it.

I'm not doing it.

Oh, these are invitations to go.

Yes, I'm not going to do it.

I think, you know, I did six out-of-state trips since September, and it's not worth it.

Yeah.

Well, maybe the mountains will come to Muhammad.

So sometimes, Victor, you know, that airport you fly into when you do fly, when the plane finally arrives, Fresno, sometimes another person who flies in there, I would imagine frequently, is Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker.

He does.

I've seen him.

He flies Bakersfield, but I've seen him at the Fresno airport.

Yeah.

Well, he's again in the news this week, Victor.

And

I'm sure I've seen a little

clip of a speech he gave where he says, essentially, you look at the Democratic Party and it looks like America.

And you look at the Republican Party and it doesn't look like America.

And I found that.

Didn't he say it was like a country club, exclusive club?

Yeah, I don't understand that.

I like Kevin McCarthy.

I wanted him to continue to be speaker.

I think he's a lot more conservative than people accused him.

I don't think he's been a rhino.

Devin Nunes, whom I have enormous respect for, he's one of the most savvy guys I know, is in a district next to him and I thinks very highly of Kevin.

But what I didn't understand about that comment were two or three things.

First, it came on some anger.

You remember they had accused him rightly or wrongly of brushing somebody deliberately when he was walking in the congressional halls.

Yes.

And it was a little weird.

You know what I mean?

And I didn't know why.

Like it was going to lead to fisticuffs or something.

Yeah, I don't know why.

And then after your speaker,

and you're down to like because of these, you know, George Santos is gone, you have this razor thin four or five and who knows who shows up it seems to me that if you were speaker and you were the nominal head of the entire republican party no matter how stupid and nihilistic it was to have you removed you know by matt gates

you would at least finish out the next 11 months or the next year

because because your seat

Gavin Newsom won't fill that seat.

I mean, he has to schedule the election, I think, and it'll be a Republican, but it'll take months.

There could be some close votes that won't, you know what I mean?

So, why would you resign right now?

Why would you?

Yeah, you're going to have a big, if you're going to get a lobbyist, it'll always be there.

Why are you going to do that?

Yeah.

If you really, really, if Kevin really wants to be Speaker and they did him an injustice, and I think they did, what he should do is stay there and then use his treasure chest.

It still must be there and tour the country and go try to get, you know, plus one Democrats margins in house seats or two and flip seats and get 20, 30 people elected in a landslide of 2024.

And then when the new people come in, have them vote you in.

And that was something.

And the other thing is, I think Johnson is trying to do a good job.

And then the fourth thing is

what he said was not true.

Not true.

If you look at the zip codes of the wealthiest places in the United States, they're all blue.

If you look at the congressional districts by per capita income, they're blue, the highest.

If you look at California,

Devin Nunes is in a Republican district.

So is Kevin.

He knows that Bakersfield is not Atherton, it's not La Jolla, it's not San Francisco.

It's much poorer.

So the money in politics is on the left.

Donald Trump was outspent three and a half to one.

And when you look at the Fortune 400, go look at it, Kevin.

Go look at it and see who they are, except for now maybe Elon Musk.

They're Zuckerberg and Michael Bloomberg and the Google Bunch and the Apple and the Amazon.

They're all that way.

And they're all in investment, hedge funds, media, tech, and they're all left-wing.

And I don't understand that.

I mean, I work at Stanford University.

I ride my bike around the campus.

You can't see a house for less than $3 million.

And believe me, when I saw the last election, that precinct went 94%

for Biden.

And so that was just wrong.

And

I don't know what he meant by that.

That's an archaic, fossilized idea that might have been true 20 years ago, but the MAGA, the whole mega agenda is hated because the middle class, populist, national, conservative movement is middle-class people.

Kevin knows that better than anything.

I can go

three miles from here, I can go to Home Depot or Food for Law or any of these big shopping center type, you know, Home Depot, and I will see

dozens of people, poor white people, poor Hispanic people, and they'll come up and talk about how conservative they are.

And I go, I go to Palo Alto and I am on the Stanford campus, and there's nobody that's conservative except a few people at Hoover.

And if I go to a restaurant, and I do a lot by myself, I try to go by myself in Minneapolis Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos.

If you're sitting by yourself for your $90 dinner that would cost $40 in Fresno, and you're sitting there and you just listen to people, and all I hear is left-wing stuff.

And they're wealthy people.

And I don't know what he meant by that.

It was inaccurate.

It was unnecessary.

It was

bothered me.

Yeah, well, it's

throw anything but in the kitchen sink and at your enemies.

And who are his enemies at this?

It's probably not the Democrats.

It's the 20 plus Republicans who, along the way, whether it was the final vote to oust him or the original series of votes to elect him

are a not small group, 20 plus, two dozen or there, who are probably, he probably considers his political enemies.

And well, he probably got,

I can understand why he got, he probably got a lot of them elected the last two or three elections because he did, that was his great strength.

He raised money and he spotted good candidates.

You know, a Mike Garcia, something, you know, a Garcia in California was was a great candidate.

And even that crazy woman in Pennsylvania, I shouldn't say that, but Representative Mace, remember her, who had to have sex before she went to the prayer breakfast?

South Carolina, Nancy Mace.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think he helped her get elected.

And some of them flipped.

But my point is this.

Does he really think the Republican Party has changed from the last 90 days since he was Speaker until now?

So if he really believed that, why didn't he say to people privately or in publicly, we got a real problem in the Republican Party?

We are an affluent, exclusive country club party.

He didn't say that.

He never said that.

He only said it when he was angry.

And that's not good.

He's got to put the,

I think we're going to lose this election in 2000.

This election has all of the makings of a,

it really does, of a 1972 nixon blowout or a 1984 reagan blowout

and better because you could take the senate you can take the house you can take the presidency and whether it's uh desantis who's still ahead of haley or trump and trump is has a huge lead they know what to do And they will come in with an agenda and people they can trust after what they've seen the last four years and the sabotage during the Trump period against him.

And all you have to do is unite.

That's all you have to do.

They should have never been fighting in front of the public with the speaker.

They should not, Kevin shouldn't be saying that now.

And they that, you know, that debate, we can talk about the debate, but Ramaswamy and Christie have zero chance to be elected.

And somebody's going to say to me, well, they brought out things by their directness and their, I don't care.

They, they took almost as much airtime as DeSantis and Haley.

And that's what people want to know.

Who's the second and who's the third if Trump gets in legal trouble?

And instead, we had all of this back and forth.

They got to unite.

Everybody's got to say, I will support the nominee, no matter what.

If you're a MAGA guy, I think I'm a MAGA guy.

I will support wholeheartedly Ron DeSantis.

I will support Donald Trump.

And I will, and I got in trouble for saying this, I will support Nikki Haley over Joe Biden.

You better believe I will.

In fact, over any socialist, which is synonymous with a Democratic nominee.

And if anybody says, well, you're just a rhino, Victor, I don't care.

Well, Victor, that's the reason Donald Trump was president in part was because he wasn't Hillary Clinton.

You know, it wasn't necessarily a lot of people voting him because they wanted Donald Trump.

A lot of people didn't want the alternative.

And

everybody should ask yourself, what did the never trumpers achieve what did george will achieve what did david from achieve what did bill crystal what did charles sykes

what did all of them achieve mona chair the whole our former colleagues i'm not trashing

the war in ukraine uh this

violence in the middle east that's what they've achieved right 500 500 obama michelle barack selected judges as well who are flooding the judiciary and you can see the ones that will be insigned insigned to Trump.

And they gave us

7% interest rates.

They gave us 8 million illegal aliens.

We're going to be dealing with that for years.

They gave us a Chinese balloon that humiliated us.

They gave us a Hamas war.

And

that's what you do when you say, not in my name will I vote for Donald Trump.

And then they said, you know, this whole dictator thing, Jack, it's just like on spec.

So Donald Trump now is ahead of Joe Biden.

A.

Joe Biden is failing geometrically, as I always say, at a geometric rate.

And he, the other day, Jack, he was mentioning a girl again.

I could not believe it.

Girl, he mentioned somebody.

I mean, he can't be let loose without.

eyeing, talking, touching some preteen girl.

He's completely unfit to be president.

And then we got Hunter, and we'll talk about the indictment, no doubt, but the whole Biden corrupt consortium is falling apart.

And the left knows it and they say, oh my God,

they're going to vote for Donald Trump.

We tried the lie about the laptop disinformation.

Don't remind us of the Russian collusion lie.

We said the Bidens were as clean as

possible.

They were just perfect.

That was a lie.

We tried to get him off the ballot.

That's not working.

We've got Letita James, Alvin Drive, Fanny Willis, and Jack Smith.

That looks pretty good.

But in case it doesn't, let's resurrect that old chestnut.

Let's get that old chestnut and say, he's a dictator.

And I thought to myself, okay.

So then he, by fiat, tried to cancel student loans?

No, right before the midterm.

Did he, by fiat, just start draining the prostrate

petroleum reserve for

electoral advantage?

No, he filled it up.

He filled it up.

Did he

lie?

Did he, his FBI guys, were they all pro-Trump and they tried to subvert the FBI?

No, they lied under oath, most of them, and they tried to ruin

him in 2016.

They let loose their retrieval service for the Biden family, whether laptops, guns, or diaries.

And of course, we know

they love Catholic masses in Latin, and they like to go after student.

They work with Twitter.

They pay him $3 million.

Did he do that?

No.

How about whistleblowers in the IRS?

Did he quash an investigation and there's whistleblowers?

No, he didn't.

And we can go on and on and on, but by any classification of a dictator, he didn't qualify.

He may have talked trash.

He may have tried to provoke people.

He may have, who knows?

But when you actually look, did he break U.S.

immigration law and let in 8 million people?

No.

He didn't do any of that.

Did he start a war?

No.

So there's no classification of dictatorship that fits him.

And yet that's what they're trying to pass on because he's ahead in the polls.

Biden's corrupt and failing.

Yeah.

Speaking of dictators, Biden sort of reminds you of Francisco Franco, right?

I mean, he's still,

he's hanging in there.

Actually, or maybe Charles, I mean, Patan, General Patan.

Yes, right.

Decrepit.

Decrepit.

I don't know.

He's,

I just don't think he's, I don't think he's going to be viable.

I really don't.

I don't think they can run him.

I don't.

I think what I think it's pretty clear now, it's kind of too late for a viable candidate.

And they've got a problem with Cornell West and this congressman.

Is his name Phillips that's running?

And then they've got Jill Stein retread and they've got Robert Kennedy.

They've got one percentage here, two percentages here three percentages one percentage you add them all up they're going to lose four or five percent in some of these states that are critical and that's whoever whoever runs and if you put him in on the ticket he's going to lose um and they know it and i don't know whether he's going to be able to finish the next 11 months but the point is

they're stuck with him and they will nominate him and then he'll have the delegates and then they can they can you know they can get rid rid of him in Henry Wallace 1944 style just get rid of him and just appoint somebody and that'll be that'll be interesting because they're going to have to then snub a black woman Camel Harris which sets the stage for Michelle I suppose yeah

Gavin didn't do too well in his debate

uh

no he didn't and uh I thought what I saw of it DeSantis did uh did fine I don't know that that propelled him to the next debate,

which I know you've talked about with Sammy.

And

only I saw his figure.

I think only 4 million Americans watched that last Republican debate.

So I don't know what consequence that will have.

But hey, Victor, you were talking about Joe Biden, and I think it's time maybe we shifted a little

generationally and get your thoughts on Hunter Biden.

And we'll do that right after

these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Victor, before we talk about

Hunter, I'd just like to take a minute to welcome back one of our fine sponsors, Carti and Company.

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Well, Victor, this, we're recording, dear listeners, on the

Saturday, the 9th of December.

And earlier this

two days ago, or maybe it was even yesterday, I forget now, Hunter Biden has finally been indicted for tax evasion.

This was

out of California.

56-page indictment came out of the special counsel's office, same special counsel that wanted to give Hunter a break.

Victor Jonathan Turley has a great analysis of this in the New York Post.

He's also been on Fox a lot.

He's on Fox frequently analyzing

this.

So finally, we've got, you know, we've got Hunter is in some legal

site.

Joe Biden is not per this.

Where'd the money come from,

Victor?

Where was all this money from which taxes were evaded?

And what about monies that were not part of this indictment?

Because

the lollygagging, intentional lollygagging, it seems, of

federal prosecutors allowed the

now I can't think of the term, you know, for the statute of limitations

to pass.

So anyway, Victor, Hunter's in the spotlight.

Your thoughts?

You know, it's very funny because he used every angle his lawyer did and of delay and delay.

So the big criminal exposure of the millions of dollars, as you said, the statute of limitations is, you know, is in effect.

So he's not going to have legal exposure.

So this was the minor, just, I don't know how many million, oh, million and a half or something.

and

most of them are misdemeanors there's three felony but what's interesting is we were driving back from los angeles i had my last pepper dine class uh to teach and

fox had a whole series of have you heard these joe biden i mean we've talked about pay your fair share he he goes on and on he's all over the country he said

rich is going to pay your fair share and then he does his little whisper pay your fair share he I mean, that was a mantra with him.

Yeah.

Anyone who doesn't make makes less than $400,000 will not see a tax increase, I think.

I'm thinking the top rate is 39%.

And California, it's, I think, over 400.

It's 13.3.

And it gets up to 9 or 10 very quickly, 60, 70, 80, 90,000.

And then you got Social Security payroll tax, and you've got Obamacare tax and all this.

and you can easily pay 55.

And if you're not in business, you have no deductions.

And so, and you look at California, 1.5% pay 50% of the income tax.

So, well, who's getting killed is our, maybe not the ultra-rich like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or those guys that have all sorts of capital gains income and all that.

But what I'm saying is that it's the upper middle class that's getting killed.

And he's been lecturing it as if there's somehow amoral.

The whole time he has been getting money where he has written at the bottom loan repayment, but he has no loan documents apparently that could substantiate that

fraudulent ruse.

And Hunter, you know, what's going to, I thought at first when he got indicted, the timing is peculiar because they've known about his shenanigans so long.

I thought, well, maybe he's scheduled to, you know, testify.

Remember how Ollie North kind of really flummoxed every time they said he would lean over to that.

He had a really brilliant Brendan Sullivan.

Brendan Sullivan was a brilliant lawyer.

I am not a potted plant.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you remember he'd always say, they had to give him limited immunity because he was facing criminal charges.

And he just had an excuse.

And Hunter, I think, will go before the House investigatory committees and say, look, I I can't talk.

I'm under investigation.

I've been indicted.

So that was unusual.

I don't know if that helps him.

And the second is it just shows you that for him to be indicted, there are people in the DOJ.

They know how to talk to people off the record.

And they basically said, okay, it's time.

And it's a win-win for us because if we get him indicted, then we can tell Donald Trump's people that Trump got indicted, but somebody in the Biden family got indicted.

And more importantly,

it may lead to Joe having to step down.

All Joe has to say is: look, I've got all sorts of problems.

I'm loyal to my son, my wonderful son, who never took a penny, who never discussed anything with him, and I've got to help him.

And he's facing legal jeopardy.

So I think this indictment would not have happened unless the Biden DOJ, because the federal charge had something to do with it.

And we'll see how it leads.

A lot of people said, well,

at least Hunter's going to be the fall guy and that'll end it.

I don't think so.

You and I have talked about that.

This guy is a, he's got a very perverse mind.

When he was facing the original IRS charges that,

you know, that the DO, Merrick Garland's DOJ let him off on, remember he had, his lawyer had threatened to call Joe Biden, his dad, as president, call him.

And that put the fear of God into Joe Biden.

I think that was very brilliant in a Machiavellian way of making sure that

that charge never came to trial because he was willing to go the full.

If he's under, and I talked about that before, you read that laptop very carefully, that laptop correspondence, and it's full of anger at Joe Biden.

you know, the big guy, and he takes, I pay his bills, and at least I'm not doing to you, and says to, I think, his daughter or his cousin, what dad's doing to me taking 50 i pay his his utilities and then under such scrutiny we've talked about that before why would he start painting with his mouth and these horrific paint by number paintings and then sell them for hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence people peddle at the influence of his dad when he's under a microscope And he does that to basically, I think he's basically saying on the laptop with the threat to call his own father, the president of the United States, in as a witness to get him tarnished and to be high,

all the bad publicity that comes from his art shakedown.

He's basically saying what he said in the laptop.

Okay,

Hunter's the bad guy.

We understand.

He snorts.

He has hookers.

He wastes money.

He drives at 120 miles.

I get it.

But you know what Hunter also does?

He does the dirty work.

He flies all over the world.

He

shakes down governments.

He brings back millions of dollars and he distributes it to Frank Biden and Joe Biden and all the Bidens.

And he never gets any credit except Hunter is a crackhead.

Hunter got a girl pregnant again.

Hunter is this.

Hunter's that.

And I'm sick of it, Hunter.

Hunter says, I'm sick of it.

And I don't get credit for enriching my whole family.

And then when he, and you can see it again, because the day after the indictment, Jack, he goes on radio i think it was was it moby

moby yeah

the the electronic synthesizer guy yes yeah i mean bald neck tattooed uh yeah oddball yeah and he goes on there and then he basically says the mother effers are trying to kill me nobody's been trying to kill you honey you've been trying to kill yourself from drugs and hookers and all of your nefarious business ties and then he starts attacking, and he's just out of control.

And

there's something there.

I keep saying he's trying.

He's basically, I think, leveraging his family.

And I think that's, it has worked because the DOJ wouldn't touch him until now.

And the only reason they're touching him now is that I think they've, they've, I think, Barack and Michelle and got together with Bernie and everybody, and they decided he's expendable, Biden, Joe, and let the wheels of justice finally, you know,

start

rolling again.

And the other thing I think is, at first, I thought

they'll never convict him in California, never,

because of the juries, the prosecutors, and the judges.

Then I thought, you know what?

When I looked at those writs and the average Californian who's left-wing and he starts seeing what he wrote off as a business expense,

you know,

prostitution

and

adult movies, all these horrific things he was claiming as a business expense.

The average person is going to go livid when they see that.

You mean I work every day and

I work at the DMV all day long and I get these deductions and I don't take any,

I get, you know, all these government deductions and it's my turn to deduct for business.

I have no business.

And this guy gets, he's tax-free because he's riding off hookers and drugs and all this stuff.

I think it'll really be hard for him to get acquitted once a good prosecutor brings up, and I think that's the reason that they have publicized it, what he actually claimed as a deduction and the lifestyle he led.

And that's going to get a lot of people very angry.

Yeah, imagine if I'm not a prosecutor, nor do I play one on television, Victor, but I could see a prosecutor asking to a jury, you know, imagine if you got tried this, just one of the one of the weirdo write-offs.

Yeah, I think he'll just say, you know what?

Or would you be here?

He'll look right at the jury and he said,

This isn't about anything other than equality under the law.

This man right there that you're looking at,

he ordered a prostitute to come to his room and you

and you and you and you paid half of it because in his income bracket,

he gets a 50%

savings when he deducts the entire cost.

So you, you, you in the jury were paying for his pornography and you were paying for his call girls and his exploitation of women and maybe some of his drugs.

And that's what you were doing.

And now you have a chance to look at him and say, not in my name.

You're not going to do it anymore.

You're going to go to jail and think about how you ripped me off if you got a prosecutor like that you'll lose by the way you saw daddy finally got asked a question which he's never asked a question by by the press but somehow or other i think a fox reporter got in

somehow uh

i forget what what the uh you know the the pool i you know it was his turn the pool and and biden was actually asked about associating with hunters business associates and the president angrily snapped back.

That's all a bunch of lies.

Just my picture, all the pictures, golf tournaments where Joe Biden is hanging out with.

Lies, lies, lies, lies, he said three times.

Lies, lies, lies.

It's the only time he's been animated since he was elected.

It was sort of like a shot of an EpiPen or an adrenaline shot.

He just suddenly came alive.

Lies, lies.

Yeah.

God, he's even Bill Clinton didn't do that when I never had sex with that woman.

I mean, this was,

it was pathetic.

Yeah.

Well, I'm worried.

Half of me,

I don't enjoy any of this.

I don't think anybody listening does.

I think we're starting to see now that this is very dangerous because we've got Iran who is almost every day with surrogates staging an attack on Americans.

They attacked the embassy in Iraq, in Baghdad, with rockets.

They're attacking everything we have.

There are ships, and they're just thinking that guy is not going to do it.

If you had a strong Republican or even a Democrat, they would act.

They would call Iran up and say, you do that one more time, and we're not going to go

invade your country, but you're going to get a big tomahawk.

And it's not going to just go at the periphery of your base.

It's going to take out your entire fleet.

It's going to take out your oil.

It's going to take out your electric.

So don't do it.

And then do it if they do it again.

Anybody American would do that.

That's the chief responsibility of the commander in chief is to protect the American people and their security.

And Iran is at the source, it's the source of all the problems in the Middle East.

And he doesn't do anything.

I mean, he gives it money through lifting sanctions.

He pays them $1.2 billion he wants to for hostages.

He tries to beg them to re-enter the Iran deal.

He doesn't say anything about Hezbollah and what they're doing with all this Iranian money.

Hamas wouldn't exist without Iranian money.

And yet he's quiet.

Well, Victor, we have time to get your thoughts on what you call the three blind mice.

And we will get to that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, on,

I'll still call it Twitter, just to antagonize

some of our listeners who do not like when I call it Twitter.

No, that's not nice.

On X, Victor, where you are writing significantly every week.

You just posted today, it's up today

on December 9th, Our Three Blind Mice.

Mice, and you're talking about Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT,

and the University of Pennsylvania's Liz McGill, who maybe you crossed paths with.

Victor, she was running Stanford's Law School.

You maybe.

Oh, yeah, I know.

I know all about Stanford's Law School.

Home of the power couple, the voice of morality, the people who are going to change the tax code to show more social justice, the person who's going to bundle all of the money in Silicon Valley and direct it to real progressive candidates that can make a real change.

Mr.

Bankman Fried's group.

Yes.

Professor and Professor Bankman and Professor and Freed and their brilliant Sam Bankman-Fried's son, all three who

live maybe, I don't know, three quarters of a mile from my apartment.

And

I don't know what to say.

They all said they had a disintegration, no interest in money, and they were progressives, and they were out.

And then we find out they're all facing lawsuits and maybe worse because they have a

Professor Bankman-Fried Bankman, I suppose.

Remember,

he writes and says something to the effect, well, I'm a consultant, my son, $250,000.

I was promised a million.

I took the year off.

I need a a million dollars from somebody else's money that I have no intention of paying back from this Ponzi scheme.

And we got a $16 million Bahamas house in our name.

I don't know how that happened.

I'm a professor of law at Stanford, but somebody just plopped down a house in our name with somebody else's money.

And we didn't say much about it.

We want to give it back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People who are

for years claim they know every iota of legal nuances, suddenly they can't, they don't know anything well they don't know anything so well i stamford law school and judge don't it's a home of judge duncan too his visit remember yeah

well so there's there's a mood there that may have been set by liz mcgill who used to run the the stanford law school right exactly exactly we had the law professor do you remember when testifying about impeachment said and she went after baron trump and said he's no baron that was one and then we had uh during this

Susan

Blasey Ford, we had another person who was out of line, a law professor.

And then we had them, they went after the Federal Society and had a fake thing like the Federal Society had started a riot.

And then we had the students who said that Judge Duncan's

daughter should be raped.

And we had the DEI woman, the law DEI, who hijacked his lecture.

And lo and behold, she she had a written script as if it was spontaneous hey judge duncan just a minute my you're not going to speak here i got to intervene oh i have a prepared speech to attack you you're my guest and that's what they did and you know

we're we're a few days out from their testimony these um the the the trio the three blind mice yeah and um i know you talked about it with with uh Sammy a little bit, but

if you wouldn't mind discussing why you felt

obligated, moved to write this piece on.

I got very angry.

I know that everybody listened got angry.

They had a smug on their face.

And the first thing was,

if you're going to be president of Harvard, or MIT, or PIN, these Ivy League exclusive, then they suggest to you that they are the best and the brightest.

They're not.

And

they suggest how you get to be president in the old days, not in the DEI days, but the old days was you were a top-flight scholar.

You were an effective teacher.

And at some point, you decided to go into be a dean.

And then you were upperly mobile.

You wrote some memos that sounded like you were kind of woke.

And then you were hired as an assistant provost.

You moved, you went to provo, and then you finally end up as the president.

Okay.

And you're supposed to be, you know, you have a PhD, a JD, and all these different degrees.

And so here you go in front of the Congress and you think, Burgess Owens, a football player, Stephaniek, I know she went to Harvard, but come on.

And here's a guy that was in business.

And

I'm just going to go in there and, you know, just

pathetic people.

How dare they?

I'll just talk about context.

They don't even know.

And man,

Stefanik just, she just, it was like she put them in a car and slowly said, press on the accelerator and go over the cliff.

And they did.

It was like, well, do you think that River to the sea and we're global infra faded is equivalent to wiping out all the Jews?

Yeah, I do.

Okay.

And you do this and this and this.

And then they said, and it's okay.

And then she was just waiting for them to say, it depends.

It depends.

So the thing that really struck me is what I'm trying to get is I had a lot of admiration for the House Republicans that were conducting these inquiries.

These people come from all walks of life, and they just remind us how much smarter, how much

better common sense they had, how much more they were logical and analytical than these academics who were just pathetic.

They chewed them up and spit them out.

It was just pathetic.

I could not believe how poorly they did.

And then when they tried to apologize the next day, they just compounded.

That was one takeaway.

The other takeaway, a second one was

they were just lying, Jack.

They were, God, they were like Gavin Newsom in that debate because they said, well,

it's context and we have free speech.

No, you don't.

That's a whole other issue, whether it's free speech to say that you want to eliminate Jews, hate speech.

But the point is not whether it is legal or not or should be legal or not.

I don't think it should.

But, you you know, people who are libertarians and First Amendment purists say, you know what,

say whatever you want.

Okay.

But they don't believe that.

Because if you apply to Harvard and you say something untoward in between the time you've been admitted and you are accepted about trans or gay or black, they're not going to let you in.

They're going to revoke your admission.

And if you're a rolling flyer, you make an fire, the esteemed economist, you make an off-caller joke or something that can be interpreted as you're gonna you're gonna be in trouble and they suspend people all the time

and stefanik pointed out if you're fat and you make fun of fat people they're gonna suspend you they they don't believe in free speech or due process like the uh the uh u penn lady who specifically said our policies are tied to

to the constitutional protection of free speech or something to that to that effect.

But it's in her Amy Wax.

Is it Amy Wax?

Yes.

She's right there.

They go after her all the time.

They've taken classes away.

Look what they did to Scott Atlas.

What did Scott Atlas do?

He said everything.

He was nostradamous.

He said everything that was going to happen happened, you know, about the lockdown.

It's going to cause more damage to school-aged children.

People are going to miss cancer screening.

The economy is going to be ruined.

Spousal boost.

And what did they do?

They sighted him and humiliated him at the School of Medicine.

They tried to take us, you know, he was put on leave.

And so they do this all the time.

And the only thing that they reminded us was,

if,

if

you're Jewish

and you are,

if you're Jewish and you're subject to a hate speech, that's okay with us.

So then that, the third thing then, as I was asking myself, well, why is that?

Why is that?

Well, because they took the old Marxist boilerplate and then the old Gramsci cultural Marxism and they put race in it.

Because the old upwardly mobile middle class doesn't work very well under the Marxist paradigm that you're going to have this proletariat that's going to seize power because they're

generation after generation exploit it.

And in America, today's guy who makes 600,000 may not be making it tomorrow.

And the guy who had nothing, and I'm looking

out my window and I can see farms where people came here with nothing and they own five, six, eight thousand acres.

So this is an upwardly mobile society compared to the rest of the world.

So they have race as the immutable

sign of oppression.

Because that way Brock can always be a victim, no matter if he's worth a billion dollars.

And that way, LeBron is always a victim.

So that's what they do.

And then that paradigm of Marxist binaries, there's no middle class.

There's no middle group.

There's nothing.

There's just peasants and lords,

you know, oppressed, oppressors, victims, victimizers.

On that hierarchy, Jews are so-called white.

I mean, I know if people are going to say, well, they were.

Hitler said they weren't.

They weren't Aryans.

Yeah, well, he was an anti-Semite.

And these people are anti-Semites who believed that, you know what, now we've decided

they're not

non-white.

They're white, and therefore they're oppressors, they're colonialists, they're settlers, and therefore we can say anything we want about them.

And we can call them, we can, if we're the head of the Harvard Law Review, we can get in the guy's way and not let him walk by.

If we see a bunch of Jews in the Cooper Union, so what?

We'll try to terrorize them.

But wait, but wait, I thought there were safe places in

these institutions.

There are safe places.

They're racist safe places.

They're for people who are marginalized, who are marginalized.

They're for

the child of a guy who's a Wall Street black lawyer or a Latino Orthodontist, his kid.

just or an Argentina aristocrat.

Anybody who can claim a victimized status under their rules.

And they don't really tell us what the rules are, by the way, Jack.

Because if they did, they would say, wait a minute, you're borrowing the 1/16th drop rule from the old Confederacy?

That's what you're doing to say somebody is not white?

Well, yeah, more or less.

And

so they're really, once you go down this racist paradigm, you have to have rules.

And you ask those people, and I've asked them before at different universities, okay, so who is Latino and who's black?

And they

don't want to tell you.

But if you press them, it's

one-eighth or one-sixteenth that can claim that.

And so

in that paradigm, it's okay.

It's open season on white-Jews, and they suffer the additional wage because these people are anti-Semitic.

And they see another thing is that I mentioned in the piece, why are they so emboldened, all these Middle Eastern students?

Why are these faculty so sure there's no consequences?

And one of the answers is

we've got a third of a million,

just like Chinese from the Middle East.

They're everywhere, foreign students.

They pay 110% of tuition.

And they come over here from the most godforsaken dictatorships,

you know, Syria,

Iran even, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, you name it, West Bank, Gaza.

And they get oil-fueled scholarships and they're a huge presence on campus.

And if you look at, once you get rid of the SAT and comparative rankings of GPAs, and once you go into repertory admissions where you admit people beyond their proportional representation, and that means your white, so-called white population on campus goes to 20 to 40 percent, well, then your old idea of a meritocracy is destroyed.

So the Jewish percentage at Harvard, or Princeton was always different.

It was the most anti-Semitic, I think, had the lowest number of Jews.

But

the number of Jewish students at Yale or Stanford or Harvard has really dropped.

It's gone from 25, 30% to 10% to 15%.

So you add that second

calculus in that there's a lot of people from the Middle East and there's a lot fewer American Jews.

And then there's a third tesser in that mosaic, and that is

you're letting people in with no sat score and no ranked gpa

as i said victor comes from salma high school my gpa is just as good as somebody at the lowell high school in san francisco

and once you do that then you're saying to all these students that you let in

five years ago ten years ago 15 years ago the type of instruction,

the quality of the courses, the the admission standards that made us the beacon of the world as far as top-ranked universities.

It was all racist.

It was all a sham.

It was just a construct.

So we're going to destroy every, just forget what we said 10 years ago.

We're going to destroy our own standards because they were racist.

So we're going to let you all in for your statement.

Stanford, if you write BLM, BLM, BLM, remember that guy, Black Lives Matter?

He got in.

And so once you bring them in, that's not the end.

That's the beginning of the problem, because then you have to tell the faculty, inflate the grades, or cut the workload or become a systemic racism.

And so you end up like Yale with 80% of the grades are

A's.

Yeah.

So you have a lot of students on campus.

At Stanford, we had a blacklist where it appeared that students in the DEI industry had the names of professors who were not not sympathetic to letting students out to protest or giving students more time to take exams

or not really enforcing deadlines for papers because of

the marginalized people had been victims of systemic racism.

And some professors, Jack, didn't understand that.

And they were old fogies or racists that stuck.

to old ossified, calcified standards.

And that's just emblematic of what what this whole calculus.

So what I'm saying in this windy rant is you've got a campus now,

the elite campus, where 70 or 80% are getting A's, where you have a lot of Middle Eastern students, and the so-called white population is down to 20, 30, 40%, even though they make up 67 to 70% of the population.

And you've got a lot of students who were let in that would not have been let in according to their standards, not yours, not mine, their standards.

And they have to adjust.

And that means that these students are very angry when they get there.

They come in, they say, you let me into Stanford and Harvard?

And now you want me to take the stupid class in Shakespeare, this white guy?

You want me to study the Peloponnesian War?

I want to take, you know,

ideology of the Middle East.

I want to take the poetics of manhood.

I want to take

Chicano dance.

I want to take

the black movie of the 1960s.

That's what I want to take.

And I want a six-figure job when I graduate.

Exactly.

So you've got a lot of students that are angry because they feel that

they were led into these exclusive schools and they can't do the work.

And the schools then have to adjust under their pressure.

You have a lot of Middle Eastern, you have a lot fewer white students and a lot, lot fewer Jewish students.

And you put all that together.

And there's one other final criterion.

It's not 1970 with $20 million endowment.

It's 50 to 60 billion at Harvard.

It's nearly 40 at Yale or higher.

It's nearly 38 or something at Stanford.

So they feel with that endowment income and they can get two, three, four billion a year and it's not taxed, they feel, well, you know, they're not going to give me $100 million.

So we have a Jewish American guy and maybe he won't give us the the 50 million, but we can do I worry more.

Yeah.

Do I worry more about him?

Or do I write something on October 7th that says

this is horrific?

This is pre-civilizational because they think, wait, wait a minute.

If I write something critical of Israel, I might please some of the donors, but man, the faculty that's DEI, all the students, they're going to be in my office.

They're going to be screaming and yelling at me.

We stack that board with DEI.

They're going to get angry at me.

So I'll just take the path of least resistance.

And although I comment on everything from George Floyd to the election of Donald Trump at Stanford, when Donald Trump got elected, we got memos from administrators that there were milk and cookies, there were safe spaces, there were stuffed animals.

I know, right?

Yeah, yeah, to commiserate bubbles,

to address our psychological trauma.

But on this thing, they either didn't say a word or or when they did speak it was to show they were on the one hand on the other hand yeah and they did this of course before the idf responded so uh it wasn't that they had any grounds to say the idf overreacted which they haven't but they could have used that they just didn't say anything or they were so anemic and wishy-washy that came out anti-Israel and pro-Hamas

and

and now

because they weigh in on everything there's other one thing is after these three blind mice were humiliated, have you noticed there's a lot of presidents now who for the first time want to be on the record?

They're coming out.

I got a memo from our president interim, a new calibration of the October 7

and the anti-Semitism.

So a lot of presidents are saying, wait a minute,

they're going to have more investigation.

I'm not going to go before that committee.

And I'm going to get a lot of angry people at me.

So I'm going to write my own little memo.

Not in our they always are saying there's a little factory somewhere in the United States where a guy turns out memos and they signed it.

And it's always, this is not who we are, Jack.

This is not who we are.

This is not in my name, not in our name.

These are insurance policies for their own jobs.

Yeah, so it was pathetic.

And the only good thing that came out of this horrific tragedy is that

it's a one-eyed jack.

They flipped the cards over, and you saw saw what's really these universities are and why we are subsidizing with millions of federal research dollars and

tax exemptions and student loans.

I don't know, but believe me, if you want to talk to someone who has a moral sense, you got a lot better chance talking to your electrician or your plumber or your drywall guy than you do your Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, MIT, sociology major.

You really do.

You know, Victor, I wonder a little bit as we

wrap up talking about the big dollar alumni donors and the size of these endowments.

That I wonder if some of the schools that are so big, now they don't give a rat's ass at these schools about the guys that give $1,000 or complaining about, they don't care because you can't write big checks.

Shut up.

But I think it's at the point with the Harvard-sized endowments that the guy that does give $100 million

is now

possibly ignorable, right?

In their complaints.

Well, Ross Stevens was the guy, you remember, that was going to, he's trying to get back the withdrawal of the $100 million.

And that kind of coincided with Ms.

McGill's, didn't they suggest that she leave the board or if she's under pressure to leave?

And also, there's an effort to get rid of the chairman of the board also.

Yeah.

And U Penn.

This is U Penn.

Because

I think

that was such a huge gift that they were afraid it would start a stampede.

And so they thought, is it really worth having Liz McGill here for $100 million?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, 20, 30, 40, 50.

But the problem is there's a lot of other guys that maybe she can cost us a billion dollars.

And we've got all these problems that we solve a lot of problems.

And we just get rid of her.

We pay her a couple million dollars and bye-bye.

Yeah, it could be, but I just think the math might be getting just to the point.

I'm repeating myself.

No, you're

sorry.

No, I agree with you.

I agree with you.

Especially, but what they're also afraid of is

if there is a Republican tsunami.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know if they're, and you get, and you look at the Heritage Foundation and other groups like that that are preparing blueprints to hit the ground.

And

DeSantis, they're talking to DeSantis, they're talking to Haiti, but they're even talking to Trump.

Don't do what you did, Mr.

Trump, in 2017, when both sides had rejected him and he had no choice, but hit the ground running with three, four, 500 people you can trust.

And that's why they're calling him a dictator.

They're scared stiff of that.

But if they go in there, they can do anything they want that's legal.

And one of the things they can say is,

we'll just condition the research money on the following criteria that you'll have to honor.

You cannot discriminate on the base of race.

If you do, you're not going to get research money.

Or, you know what?

We like Hillsdale College.

We like Pepperdine, but any endowment over a billion dollars, we're going to tax.

We'll just tax them.

So we like all the small schools, but anything over a billion or a billion and a half dollars, you're going to pay, you know, your 40% income tax on that.

And that will dry up the DEI administrative bloat very quickly.

Or they might say, you know, we tried the student loans, but, you know, 30% of them are in default.

It's been very pernicious because it creates prolonged adolescence where these kids go there.

They take three, six, nine units.

They know there's no penalty from defaulting.

The loans aren't that cheap anyway.

So we're just going to get out, write the whole damn thing off.

And if you guys want to loan money to students, Mr.

Harvard, you do it on your own endowment.

You've got $50 billion.

Just set aside $10 billion and say this backs up the loans of Harvard students.

And same thing with Stanford and Yale.

And I guarantee you, they will graduate in four years and they will get a competitive education so they can earn the money to pay back those loans.

So get the moral hazard where it belongs.

And you do that.

And I think, and maybe you should say to the

donor class, you know, if you really like Harvard or Stanford or Penn, just give them the money, but we're not going to give you a write-off on it.

Why should the taxpayer pay 50%

of that cost for this?

Because, you know,

look what they're teaching to students.

They're coming in.

And I think the the most controversial thing I ever wrote was saying that we should have like a bar exam only at the undergraduate level.

People got so angry.

I got such hate mail.

Why don't you just have an SAT your senior year?

Everybody in the United States, there's such that you know, we have an SAT, they used to for admission, and the purpose with the SAT was

there's so many gradations of GPAs, we have no idea what people in Salma and Fowler and Kingsburg are learning, California, where I live, versus people in Atherton and

you know Los Altos three hours away so we'll have an SAT and maybe a kid at Fowler High School got a perfect SAT

so that was the way that we checked it it was based on meritocracy and it was almost based

I think you could trace some of the popularity of it of the anti-Semitism of the 40s

30s and 40s where Jews that were going coming you know immigrants that were in the Bronx and the Queens, and they were letting in gentlemen C students from these

Ritzy areas.

And then they said, you know what, maybe these kids don't have to go to those high schools or that live in those area zip codes or whatever.

Maybe they can just take the SAT.

And so I think they can just say, if we did it for admissions, we'll do it on the back end.

We have no idea whether a BA from Stanford is better or the student is more knowledgeable than a BA from Hillsdale College.

I do because because I've taught at both places.

And I can tell you, a BA at

contemporary Hillsdale College means a lot more than a Stanford BA, especially in the humanities.

So my point is: everybody has to take SAT.

We'll take an arbitrary figure.

You got to get 600 in the verbal and the math after four years of studying.

You do that, and they would panic.

And

we'll see.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

you've dispensed a lot of wisdom here today, and folks who want to get even more of your wisdom should be going to the Blade of Perseus.

That's your official website.

Well, you know that, but we have a lot of new listeners.

They might not know that.

Go to victorhanson.com.

That's the web address.

And

you will find

links to everything Victor writes for American Greatness and for his

weekly syndicated column.

You will find

links to to his other appearances, to his forthcoming book, which, by the way, is The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

That's coming out in May of 2024.

Links to his other books.

the archives of this podcast and the articles he writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus.

They've got a little black box with the word ultra on them.

And you're going to click on it.

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And if you're a fan of victor's writings you should be subscribing victor writes two or three ultra pieces every week so that's uh how much how's it cost what do i do well there's a subscribe button there on the top of the home page click on it it's five dollars a month five dollars gets you in the door anyway as i like to say but it's discounted full year fifty dollars so go to

the blade of perseus at victorhanson.com.

We're talking before just now about the piece Victor wrote for Twitter/slash X.

And if you want to follow Victor, his handle is at

sign VD Hanson.

If you're on Facebook, VDH is Morning Cup, check that out.

What else?

Oh, there's on Facebook, there's a lovely, terrific fan club.

It's not formally officially affiliated, but just great people.

And that's called the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

So

do go there.

That's for me, Jack Fowler.

I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

And Civil Thoughts gives you 14,

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Go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.

So, Victor, I will wrap up the show

because we are at the end with

a comment that someone left at iTunes/slash Apple, which you can rate the Victor Davis-Hansen show there, zero to five stars.

Thanks to all those who take the time to do that.

And the average over close to 7,000 people is 4.9 stars.

So that's great.

Everyone's loving it.

Many people leave comments.

We read them all.

And here's one that's titled A Gentleman and a Scholar.

Succinctly, the very best, enlightening, entertaining, and engaging and enjoyable experience in e-broadcasting, e-broadcasting every time.

With much respect, M.

Bateman,

Edmonton.

This is that city, not Winnipeg, North and Alberta, who also goes by

one green, one yellow.

Well, anyway,

M.

Bateman, very kind of you to say that about gentleman and scholar, Victor Davis Hanson.

Victor, you've been terrific today.

Thanks so much, my friend.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is an audience from all the comments that I really admire because you don't need context.

You understand you have a basic moral and

analytical

sense of what's right and what's wrong without pleading context.

And in that case, at least, you're all brighter and more reliable than the presidents of our top institutions.

Amen.

I believe that.

I really do.

Thank you, everybody.